How do we choose a mayor? It's been so long since we've had a contested
election that I've lost track of what the plan is. I guess the candidates
run as non-aligned individuals. But haven't we had mayoral primaries in the
past? Now we don't seem to have one scheduled. The election is scheduled for
2/22, I think. And is the winner the guy with the most votes? If all these
folks run, we could get a mayor with 20 percent of the vote, then, couldn't
we? I need a refresher course here.

Your confusion is understandable. Given the
history of Chicago over the past half-century, you'd figure the main thing
that happens is Richie Daley and his family have a meeting to decide which
kid gets to be mayor next.

This is foolish thinking. We have this thing
called an election, in which various individuals run, and we get to pick
one. (So far
five candidates have filed petitions, and at least one more is
expected.) We've done this before  in fact we've gone through the motions
every four years. The difference this time is that the winner isn't a
foregone conclusion.

For many Chicagoans, this is a frightening
prospect. Those who've been around for a while recall that the last
seriously contested elections took place during that brief period in the
1980s when the mayor of Chicago wasn't named Daley. This is now widely
thought of as the Time of Troubles. The lesson many drew is that meaningless
elections = peace and prosperity, whereas democracy = bad.

Well, we're going to have to suck it up. The
big procedural change  and here we get to your question, CC  is that
Chicago mayoral elections are
now officially
nonpartisan, meaning the candidates don't declare their party
affiliations, not that there's any grave doubt. On the last Tuesday in
February, the 22nd, they'll all be listed on the same ballot. If no one gets
more than 50 percent of the votes, a runoff election between the top two
vote-getters will be held six weeks later, on the first Tuesday in April.

It all sounds so calm, so sensible, so
un-Chicagoan. But don't be deceived. However virtuous the system may look
now, it wasn't put in place because of saintly considerations. Rather, it
was meant to ensure that an electoral outcome a lot of people weren't too
happy with never happens again.

The most famous mayoral election in Chicago
history
well, I shouldn't say that; all the inter-Daley elections were pretty
memorable. But certainly the one with the most dramatic consequences took
place in 1983.

Mayoral elections at the time were partisan 
Democrats and Republicans, all seventeen of them in the latter case, voted
on separate ballots. Jane Byrne was the none-too-popular incumbent. She had
two challengers in the Democratic primary, Richie Daley and Harold
Washington. The possibility of a black man becoming mayor wasn't taken
seriously by most pundits (I believe Walter Jacobson was an exception); some
viewed the race as a contest between the north side and south side Irish.
But when the ballots were counted, Washington had won.

He didn't get a majority, though. He garnered
just 37 percent of the vote, mostly from the energized black community,
compared to 33 percent for Byrne and 30 percent for Daley. Election rules at
the time didn't provide for runoffs. If they had, Byrne undoubtedly would
have beaten Washington decisively  white Chicagoans may not have been wild
about the city's first woman mayor, but better her than the first black one.

As it was, their only option was voting for
the Republican nominee in the general election, an obscure state legislator
named Bernard Epton. Quite a few did, but it tells you something about the
depth of political feeling in Chicago that a sizable number of white voters
decided they'd rather have an African-American as their mayor than a
Republican. Washington won, 52 percent to 48 percent.

You know what happened
after that. It's
fair to say the city's power brokers concluded: we're not doing this twice.

The idea of a nonpartisan mayoral election
with a runoff if no one got a majority was first bruited in 1986, during the
runup to the 1987 mayoral contest. The intent clearly was to avoid splitting
the white vote again and letting Washington be re-elected. Richie Daley
among quite a few others supported the plan, but an attempt to put it up for
a city referendum failed.

As it happened, only one serious white
candidate, Byrne, ran against Washington in the 1987 Democratic primary. The
mayor defeated her 54 percent to 46 percent, then went on to beat Eddie
Vrdolyak, who had been reborn as a Republican, by a wide margin in the
general election.

A 1988 effort to push nonpartisan elections
through the state legislature died, but the idea came up again in 1995, when
Republicans took control of the General Assembly and the governor's office
for the first time in 25 years. They used the opportunity to push through a
long list of cherished measures that had gone nowhere while the Democrats
were in control, one of which was nonpartisan mayoral elections in Chicago.

Public discussion of the change as it wended
its way through the legislature was muted by local standards. Some black
political activists hated it and threatened legal action; Daley remained
neutral. Pretty much everyone else was in favor, and how could they not be?
David Axelrod, who had worked for both Washington and Daley, told the
Tribune, "It forces you to appeal to a broader constituency than to one
ethnic or racial group."

Hard to argue with. Governor Jim Edgar signed
the measure into law, and it's what we're using now. Is it fair? Yeah, it's
fair. The fact remains that had nonpartisan elections been the rule in 1983,
Harold Washington wouldn't have been elected, and breaks like the one that
enabled him to become mayor are precisely what the system is intended to
prevent.